Most classes that I’ve taken, the tests that are memory-based. If you cram for a test, you can generally do well. I took an Art History class freshmen year. For the exams, we had to memorize over 40 buildings, their architects, when they were built, and why they were significant. On every exam, I crammed the night before every test, and I ended up with an A- in the class. Do you think I remember any of those architects or dates? No, of course not! I have found that cramming is not an option in this class. Either you understand the material or you don’t, There are no random dates your have to name off, just concepts to understand. Cramming may help you get through a test but is it beneficial to your learning? NO. Cramming is not beneficial because it affects our sleeping habits, it does not utilize our long term memory, and it promotes a habit of procrastination.
Exhausted Student Falling Asleep While Cramming — Image by © Randy Faris/Corbis
Sleep seems to be just a suggestion when it comes to college students. Before my final reviews, I will go 3 days straight with only 8 hours of sleep total. I know this is very unhealthy for me, but also expected with demanding major such as Architecture. My professor even tells us to pull all-nighters even when I’ve already been working in studio for 8 hours. Cramming before an exam often means that you choose studying over sleep. There are studies that show sleep is actually more important to your academic success than extra studying. UCLA did an observational study on with 500 high school students. They asked the students to keep track of their sleep and their academic performance for a short 2 weeks. The results of the study showed the students that chose to studying over sleep did worse academically than those that did not.
Memory is also very important when it comes to learning. I learned a lot about memory in my Psychology 101 class my freshmen year. The memory process consists of your initial sensory memory. You encode information from there into your working memory (also known as the short-term memory). From there, you encode important information into your long term memory. Your long term memory is where you can store and retrieve memories. According to that class Forgetting is when you can’t retrieve information because of encoding failures or retrieval failures. Our working memory can only hold 5-9 things at a time. This does not leave room for all the information that you try to fit in your head in one night. This often leads to retrieval failures during the exam and definitely does not help with the encoding process into your long term memory. This is we are told by our professors to review our notes every week instead of waiting until the exam comes. Study habits like chunking and mnemonics devices are also good study habits because they help our brain encode and retrieve better.
We’ve all be told (by Andrew) that procrastination is bad. I am ashamed to admit that I’m really bad when it comes to procrastinating. I plan out everything that I do, but I plan it to the last minute. If you are cramming for a test the night before, you have been procrastinating. Cramming is bad because it promotes the habit of procrastination. An observational study done on over 700 students showed that the closer the deadline was when the students turned their assignment in, the worse their grade was. The study also showed that there was no significant difference in the grading before the 24 hour mark. Since this was an observational study, we can argument that the findings could be do to a third variable such as, smarter people turn in their stuff earlier. Even if that is the case, handing your work in earlier may not be that hard to manage but the outcome seems to be very beneficial.
These observations and information about how the brain works supports my claim that cramming is bad for your learning. Sleep is more important than cramming, our memory system doesn’t support cramming, and our procrastinating tendencies promotes cramming, yet affects us negatively in the end. So how come so many college students do it? That is a question for another blog post.
This was such a prevalent blog! It is nice to see the science behind this advice which we have been brushing off our shoulders pretty much since the beginning of our schooling. While this blog did a good job demonstrating why cramming is bad, there is little explaining why sleep is better. The paper in the link below does a good job explaining the relationship between amount of sleep and academic achievement.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1087079205001231
This article is interesting because as a college student, I have definitely experienced what it’s like to cram as much as possible before a big test. I agree with you when you say that cramming doesn’t actually help our learning. Sure, I can know 50 names and dates for a test, but by the next day, I’d be surprised if I even remembered two or three. Most tests are based off of memorization, which I don’t think is really that effective. Anyone can sit down and memorize a list of names. This doesn’t really help determine who understands the concepts and who does not. In my opinion, students need to stop being tested on their memories.
As someone who has a absolutely terrible memory, I totally agree with you that we shouldn’t be tested on memory as much! What I enjoyed most about my Architecture Theory class (and this class) is that it’s about critical thinking and understanding the subject, not just know facts about it. I could never understand how some people could memorize facts so quickly! Obviously, it’s probably much easier to test people on facts than concepts but do you think that there are some subjects where memorization is just as important as concepts?
In high school I would always cram at the last minute. My thinking was if I studied too far in advance for the test I would forget what I studied. I have learned in college that it is necessary to prepare days and maybe even weeks in advance for a single exam. Here is a video that helped me cram in high school.
I am definitely someone who leaves most assignments to the last minute because I work harder when I am cramming. As a freshman I’ve realized that cramming for tests is very hard because the shorter you spend studying something the easier it is to forget. I recommend studying days in advance as I’m sure you know. I liked the way you broke down cramming into sections such as memorizing and sleep. This was well written and very relatable with the studies to back up your claim.